Greta Gerwig is actually Clint Eastwood. With both of them, one always thinks that their directing technique must have something to do with the characters that they have already portrayed on the other side of the camera. But do people like Dirty Harry or the guy with no name from the spaghetti westerns make operas about lonely snipers or young boxers? People like the bathrobe romantic Mattie from “Nights and Weekends” (2008) spin para-feminist coming-of-age hits (“Lady Bird”, 2017) and costume hits with, how do you say, depth (“Little Women”, 2019)?
One might think of Mattie, embodied by Greta Gerwig, from “Nights and Weekends” (where Gerwig also shared the direction with her co-star Joe Swanberg in 2008) with “Barbie”: Perhaps this Mattie played with Barbies as a child, to compensate for her mental and physical awkwardness, her dopey dystonia and dyskinesia, which later makes her stagger through her love life like a seahorse in vodka? Mattie has a serious heart. Once she says: “I don’t respond to sarcastic fun”, I don’t address fun with corrosive humorous secondary thoughts.
Good eighty percent fun
Interestingly, however, Gerwig’s “Barbie” feature film consists of a good eighty percent of exactly this kind of fun. Margot Robbie plays one of numerous Barbies, all named Barbie, who live in Barbieland, with all Kens, the most important of whom, because the most average Ken, is actually Ryan Gosling. In Barbieland, the girls have the big say: President, Supreme Court, Nobel Prize winners. But one day NormBarbie Robbie gets a crack: The immaterial morning milk (there are no liquids here) tastes sour; Thoughts of death and flat feet come up.
Played by comedienne Kate McKinnon, the “weird Barbie” (a child played “too hard” with her) has one piece of advice: if a Barbie is like Robbie-Barbie, then something happened while playing in the real world. So Robbie-Barbie has to go there and straighten it out. Gosling-Ken stows away and learns what patriarchy is in Los Angeles. He hurries back to Barbieland and, now infected with the wrong thing, causes a great deal of mischief. Meanwhile, in reality, Will Ferrell, as the boss of the toy company Mattel, tries to force or lure Barbie back into her box. Here, Gerwig takes the film away from her leading lady for a while and presents it to America Ferrera, the mother in a mother-daughter dyad that takes the story’s dollness to the human.
Ferrera delivers an impressive monologue about how impossible it is to be a woman, whether you’re trying to be a housewife, a writer, a mother or a doll, and that monologue, with its implicit and very reasonable feminist minimal demands, is the great heart of the film. Very good jokes about horses and heavy metal typography follow (Ken’s belt buckle . . .) and less good jokes about capitalism (yes, money corrupts, and it’s colder at night than outside). One or the other sing-and-dance revue number, one or the other chase could have been left out, even if each one is fine on its own. All in all, the slapstick and show elements have their value above all as packaging material for the quiet, deep passages. These spots are almost always strong.
2023-07-19 06:28:17
#Barbie #Greta #Gerwig #irony #pop #culture #criticism #capitalism
